Monthly Archives: September 2012

Interlude: On the road

September 30, 2012 – 6:34 am

As my regular readers know, I’m currently on a three-week (roughly) road trip with my father, from Chicago to San Diego for Conjecture and then back. I let my Dad plan the route. If I ever do that again, I will double-check it a week in advance and find out whether there is anything going on [...]

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Imperfect telepathy

September 26, 2012 – 6:42 am

Writing is not a visual medium, not in the way that photographs, paintings, or movies are visual. Yet there are readers and writers who think of it this way. It’s quite common for writers to describe “the movie in my head” or “seeing the scene and just writing it down.” There are two potential problems [...]

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Body language

September 23, 2012 – 6:30 am

Body language is one of those things that has to some extent become a code. “He shrugged” “She sighed” “I smiled” and so on have become almost like punctuation – nearly meaningless things inserted into a paragraph or a line of dialog to let the reader know that there’s a pause here, or a small [...]

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Writing on the road

September 19, 2012 – 6:47 am

Next week, I’m leaving on a 2-1/2 week road trip with my father. It’s not really a vacation – I’m guest of honor at Conjecture in San Diego Oct 5-7 – but Dad and I decided to take the extra time to drive out from Chicago and stop to see things and maybe visit some family [...]

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It’s not the same

September 16, 2012 – 6:30 am

There are a number of bits of wisdom that nonwriters frequently impart to writers, usually with the best of intentions. Some of them are useful and very true, like “You need to send that out, you know.” Other times…not so much. One of the not-so-much categories comes in the form “If you (the writer) do [...]

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Election year writing

September 12, 2012 – 6:42 am

It’s election year in the U.S. and there’s almost no getting away from it anywhere. One of the things I hear over and over is people complaining about the polarization, how nasty the ads are, and so on. All the drama is, of course, a gold mine of material for writers, but stepping back a pace [...]

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Idioms and catchphrases

September 9, 2012 – 6:18 am

One of the many areas that some writers find problematic about dialog is the use of idioms. This is especially tricky for SF and fantasy writers who are trying to create a realistic-sounding but still-comprehensible imaginary world. The first common mistake, especially for science fiction writers, is to go to one extreme or the other [...]

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Plotting and planning

September 5, 2012 – 6:45 am

Plotting a story is one of those writing things where not only does every writer work differently, every book works differently. Oh, there are patterns – I’ve talked before about my write-a-plan-and-then-toss-it method – but they never seem to work one hundred percent consistently for even one writer, let alone a sizeable number of them. [...]

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So the house guests just left…

September 2, 2012 – 2:50 pm

I’ve had house guests for the past five days (my cousin stayed with me; my Dad stayed with my sister), and in the process of doing all the show-the-out-of-town-family-around stuff, doing the blog got kind of behind. Which is why I’m late and a bit disconnected with this. Yesterday, we went to the State Fair. [...]

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